My Responsibilities
- Datamerge Design
- Spreadsheet Design
- Indesign Scripting
- File Preparation
Description
Gudnak is a deck building tactical combat duel game by publisher Chaotic Great Games—get all the cards you need to play, and then master clever deck building with tons of gorgeous and tricksy cards, all dripping with the lore of a rich fantasy world.
Design Story
Chaotic Great Games came to me with a problem: they had 850 beautiful card designs in a number of different templates—fighters, tactics, constructs and more—each in its own Photoshop file. I created a datamerge template for InDesign that would allow them to generate all 850 of their cards into a text-editable InDesign file ready for editing and print. My workflow allowed their team to quickly make sweeping edits to their rules text (like changing keyword names), and easily generate additional card for playtesting.
I created spreadsheet formulas to transition their existing card data into datamerge-readable formats, and bespoke InDesign scripts to handle Gudnak’s unusual layout needs, including nested text styles, and faction specific text styling.